Registered: Oct 2001
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Those of you who have read Dana’s “Two Years Before The Mast” are aware that San Diego, California is a very old city originally the center of the cow hide trade in California. Ranchers in the area north and east of San Diego would slaughter cattle and dry the hides in the plentiful California sun and throw them off the cliffs of Point Loma when the ships came buy. The ships would pick up the floating bales of hides identified with the rancher’s brand and send in a boat with payment which they would deposit with the fathers of the monastery there to be picked up by the ranchers.

San Diego is without doubt one of the most beautiful cities in the United States. Point Loma curls around the seaward side and protects the city from the Pacific when it gets angry. In modern San Diego there is a narrow inlet between Point Loma and Coronado island that is deep enough for the biggest ships of the Navy but not more than a half-mile wide. In Dana’s day Coronado Island was not really an island but a peninsula connected to the mainland by a set of mud-banks. The inlet under Point Loma was almost a half circle and was very difficult for wind-powered ships to navigate,which is why the ranchers threw the bales of hides off the seaward side of the Point Loma cliffs.

I first saw Point Loma on a July morning from the door of a troop sleeper. “Troop sleeper” is a euphemism for a freight boxcar fitted with three-high bunks and a toilet that consisted of a metal plate with a hole cut in it with a welding torch and a sign saying not to use the facility in any town. The troop sleeper was the most usual way of moving troops across the U.S. during WWII. Only VIPs traveled on the DC-3s and Ford Tri-Motors that crossed the continent.

I had been sworn into the Navy at Fort Sam Houston, an Army base in San Antonio and immediately herded aboard a troop sleeper en route to San Diego. There was something like five hundred of us on that train. Half of us were Texas boys and the other half were from Arkansas.

I lucked out right away and got a top bunk where I spent hours and hours watching the crap game going on below. I was essentially right above the game. From that viewpoint it was obvious to me that one of the players had four rather than two dice in his hand during part of the game. One of the players with whom I had struck up a friendship, a fellow named Patterson from Taylor, Texas had lost all of his money and left the game. I motioned to him to climb up to my bunk and whispered to him to watch the fellow with the extra pair of dice in his hand. Patterson suddenly saw what was going on and bailed out of the bunk landing on the dice shark and starting quite a fight. The cheat was from Arkansas, and Patterson finally threw him out the big open door of the sleeper while the train was in motion. The fellow did get back aboard on a following car but we would not allow him back in our car until the train stopped at a siding and he ran up outside the train and got back on his own car full of Arkies. We never saw him again during the trip.

As soon as I arrived in San Diego my entrance into the Navy was once more put in doubt when my heart failed a test during the physical at the base. I had to sit on a wooden bench at the induction building for two days while a medical board decided that my heart anomaly would not deter my service to the nation and I was issued my uniforms and allowed to rejoin my fellow Texans in Recruit Company 323. By then they had been in the Navy for two days and were “old salts”.

I will never forget our Company Commander who was Chief Boatswain’s Mate Roy G. Sanders. Sanders was the single most profane individual I have ever known. He never said two consecutive words of common English without the injection of profane or scatological words. He had service hash marks from wrist to elbow. We learned later that he had three ships shot out from under him during the war to date and was raging to get back out to sea. He had two Seamen First Class helpers to assist him in trying to make sailors of us. One of the most comical scenes of my boot camp training was a lecture by the company commander that under direction of the Chief of Naval Operations forbade the use of profanity on any naval base or ship.

Actually I loved boot camp. I ended up being the company coxswain during lifeboat races, I quickly learned the old Navy system of getting my comrades slightly indebted to me and really had a ball. One Mexican man from San Antonio was slightly older than the rest of us. He was in his thirties and had a wife and kids back in the Alamo City. His last name was Cadena (which means “chain” in Spanish). He became convinced that I could tell fortunes with the cards, because I jokingly told him one day that he would receive an important letter the next day and that is just what happened. He got a letter from his wife saying she was leaving him for another man.

After eight grueling weeks of training we finally got liberty passes and could see a bit of the town. On our first liberty three of us were able to get only one hotel room in San Diego and all slept in the same bed. Bob Albertson woke the other two of us up at 3 AM and said that he was sick and heading back to the base. Turns out we were sleeping with a guy who had scarlet fever and a high temp at the time. Luckily neither of us came down with it. I next saw Albertson at the University of Texas some two years later and had he had lost all of his hair.

San Diego has probably the best zoo in the United States. It is fantastic. Balboa Park is also one of the most beautiful spots in the US. Generally the citizenry of San Diego was hostile to the huge influx of sailors and Marines that WWII brought about but there were exceptions. I really came to appreciate the USO centers and the high school and college girls that came down to them to dance with sailors and just hold hands while their mothers or grandmothers acted as duenas.

After much testing I was told that despite my desires to be a meteorologist that my aptitude best suited me to be an electronic technician and that I was headed for a school of fourteen months duration to become one. The first phase of this schooling was EE&RM (Elementary Electricity And Radio Materiel) school, and four such schools existed in the US. I got my choice of these schools and selected Treasure Island in San Francisco Bay. When my orders came they said report to USS Hugh Manley in Chicago Illinois. I was not surprised.

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